Meet Hualing Nieh, Mo Yan’s “Literary Mother”

Orhan Pamuk and Mo Yan, Noble Prize winners in Literature, were both writers-in-residence at the prestigious International Writing Program. An interview with IWP’s current director about one of the program’s founders, the remarkable Chinese novelist Hualing Nieh.

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Angie Chen’s 2012 documentary One Tree Three Lives documents the remarkable life story of Chinese novelist and essayist Hualing Nieh, who endured civil war in China and political repression in Taiwan before eventually settling in the United States, where she helped found the prestigious International Writing Program (IWP) with her husband, the late American poet Paul Engle.

The film conveys the force of Nieh’s intellect and personality while also documenting how she and Engle were able to build the IWP into a major residency for literary figures from around the world. Among the program’s many other accomplishments, it was one of the first to host Chinese writers in the US after the resumption of diplomatic relations in the 1970s, and in more recent years it has counted two Nobel Laureates in Literature—Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk (2006) and China’s Mo Yan (2012)—among its participants.

In partnership with the International Writing Program, Asia Society New York will present One Tree Three Lives this Saturday, November 10, at 6:00 pm. After the screening, Nieh (appearing via Skype) and filmmaker Chen will be joined on stage for a discussion by Christopher Merrill, the IWP’s current director and the author of four volumes of poetry and five works of nonfiction.

Asia Blog’s Jeff Tompkins reached out to Merrill via email ahead of his New York appearance to talk about Hualing Nieh and the International Writing Program.

Jeff Tompkins: One Tree Three Lives suggests that Hualing Nieh and Paul Engle conceived of the IWP as a kind of trans-national space where writers could meet and engage with one another, outside of or above politics. How does the organization nurture a similar environment today? Were there particular challenges in the post-9/11 world, for instance?

Christopher Merrill: Our mission remains the same: to provide enough space and time for gifted writers from around the world to engage in a conversation about all manner of things, from favorite books and music to politics and cuisine. I tell them on the first day of the residency that they should make writing their priority, and while many do complete books during their stay some use their time to absorb the intensely literary atmosphere of Iowa City, which in 2008 was designated as the first, and only, UNESCO City of Literature in this hemisphere.

This fall we hosted 31 writers from 28 countries, each of whom brought to the table their unique literary sensibility, and that made for a robust conversation—what a colleague likes to call our three-month-long performance piece.

The documentary gives the impression that bringing in writers from both mainland China and Taiwan was a particular concern for Nieh and Engle. Do you sense that Hualing’s reputation is still a draw for the next, or emerging, generation of Chinese writers?

Hualing remains actively involved in recruiting the best Chinese writers to the IWP; in my time, thanks to her, we have hosted Mo Yan, Xi Chuan, Li Rui, Su Tong, Yu Hua, Chi Zijian, Meng Jing-hui, Liu Heng, Jin Renshun, Ge Fei, Bi Feiyu, and Zhang Yueran, to name a few. Hualing is revered in Chinese literary circles—and rightly so. What she has contributed to world literature, in terms of the IWP and her ongoing efforts to foster dialogue among Chinese writers from the mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, is an incalculable good.

It’s impressive to learn that two of the most recent Nobel Prize winners in Literature, Orhan Pamuk and Mo Yan, were both writers-in-residence at the IWP. Did you have any personal experience with either author, and do you know if either of them interacted with Nieh?

Orhan Pamuk was in residence during Hualing’s tenure, and I gather that he spent most of his time writing The Black Book, which is regarded as his breakthrough novel.

Mo Yan came to the IWP in 2004, and he impressed me as a brilliant writer and a sweet man. In one email to Hualing after he won the Nobel Prize he said that she was his literary mother; in a follow-up message she learned that a wealthy businessman in China had offered Mo Yan a mansion in celebration of his Nobel Prize. His father rejected it: “No! No! No mansion. My son comes from a peasant family. He won’t take anything he didn’t earn with his labor.”

Those of us on the outside of the institution might be curious to know if or how the IWP is related to the equally venerated Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Do they have a complementary relationship? Is there much back-and-forth between the respective faculties, writers-in-residence, and student populations?

The IWP grew out of the Writers’ Workshop, which Paul Engle directed for nearly a quarter of a century before he and Hualing founded the IWP. The two programs occupy a pair of old houses across the street from each other, my staff includes a number of Workshop graduates, and during the fall residency the graduate students and visiting writers interact in a variety of ways—in our translation workshop, in joint readings, in the local watering holes. I spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out ways to interest students in what might be happening outside the precincts of American letters—in world literature, that is, some of the best of which is on display in the IWP.

Events

Four Sessions, 3 hours each (6-9pm)
Tuesdays, August 8, August 15, August 22, and August 29
Fees & Payment Options:
$220 General / $200 AAWW Members (JOIN THE FAN CLUB!)
Full payment due before first class. Maximum of ten students.
Why you should take this class: Writer & Director Darine Hotait bridges the gap between literature and cinema due to her genuine fascination and devotion to both. A mentor in numerous screenwriting workshops at film festivals and institutions such as the Med Film Festival in Rome, Arab Film Festival in Rotterdam, Mizna Literary Gathering in Minneapolis, among others —Darine invites you to learn how to take the elements that construct a screenplay into development: act structure, character development, and scene breakdown.
Class Description: Develop your screenwriting skills with award-winning writer and director Darine Hotait, whose films screened at top international film festivals, received multiple Best Fiction awards and were acquired by Sundance TV, AMC Networks & BBC Channel. Her feature screenplays were selected at Cannes Film Festival's International Scriptwriters' Pavilion and were among the top 5 finalists at Hearst Screenwriting Competition. She's the recipient of the AFAC cinema grant and a current literary fellow at New York Foundation for the Arts.
Over the period of 4 weeks, writers will be guided through the process of developing a feature film screenplay using various hands-on exercises. Participants are expected to have a one-page storyline that they wish to develop into a feature film screenplay during the workshop. REGISTER HERE
Questions? Contact Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org
Darine Hotait is the writer and director of various short films Beirut Hide and Seek (2011), and I Say Dust(2015), which screened at over 70 international film festivals and received multiple Best Short Fiction awards. Her films received prestigious distribution and were acquired by reputable platforms such as AMC Network, Sundance Channel, BBC Channel, Shorts International & The Journal of Short Films. Her debut science fiction feature film project Symphony of a Flood was selected at the International Screenwriters' Pavilion at Cannes Film Festival 2016 and was a finalist at the prestigious Hearst Screenwriting Competition at San Francisco Film Society.
Her plays and short stories have been published in numerous publications in print and online. Darine has mentored over 50 screenwriting workshops around the world at various institutions and international film festivals. Since 2010, Darine serves as the founder and creative director of Cinephilia Productions in New York City, an incubator for the development of writers and filmmakers from the MENA region.
Praise for I Say Dust (2015)“The film’s power and beauty comes in its subtlety. The story’s intensity and potency lies in Darine’s ability to sing cinematic brilliance in the interstices between scenes and to reveal more about the characters in their silence. The plot is unsaturated and always in dialogue with the audience: what is strategically unpictured by Darine is viscerally felt by the viewer.”
— Leena Habiballah, Qahwa Project, US“The characters are complex, the writing – interspersed with poetry – is so touching, and the shots so poignant it just seems like a damn shame it’s a short rather than a feature length film.”
— Wided Khadraoui, Kalimat Magazine“There is romance, sweet and ephemeral - an encounter more potent, perhaps, for the sense of coming home. A thoughtful film which packs a lot of ideas into a tight space, I Say Dust speaks well to the talents of those involved. It’s no surprise that it has multiple awards to its name.”
— Jennie Kermode, Eye For Film (Edinburgh)..

Four Sessions, 2 hours each (7-9pm)
Wednesdays August 9th, August 16th, August 23rd, August 30th
Fees & Payment Options:
$200 General / $180 AAWW Members (JOIN THE FAN CLUB!)
Full payment due before first class. Maximum of fifteen students.
Why you should take this class: Poet Sally Wen Mao, award-winning author of Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014), has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2013, BOMB Magazine, Poetry, and more. You can explore Lavender Town in The Margins and check out the feature in Bustle listing her as one of the best poetry debuts in the last five years. Sally Wen Mao invites you to re-invent language and to re-invent the familiar in this protest poetry workshop.
Class Description: We are living in a senseless political era. How do we react, as writers, artists, and citizens? Where do we channel our anger, our protest, our ideals – how do we do right by our art and our politics? In this workshop, participants consider the political poem and examine the ways to approach resistance through language, lyric, and form—in poetry or in lyric essays. Drawing from contemporary poets like Layli Long Soldier, Tommy Pico, Timothy Yu, Srikanth Reddy, Solmaz Sharif, and Claudia Rankine, we will examine over the course of several sessions the tools we can use to dismantle the powerful narratives that silence and oppress – and in that process, discover our own political voice. This course will include writing exercises and generative sessions as well as a workshop.
REGISTER HERE
Questions? Contact Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org
Sally Wen Mao is the author of OCULUS (Graywolf Press 2019) and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Poets & Writers, The Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, Kundiman, Jerome Foundation, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference, among others. Her poems have received a Pushcart Prize and published in Tin House, Poetry, Best American Poetry 2013, and A Public Space, among others.
​”​Linguistically dexterous and formally astute, Mao’s tight and textured debut ​[Mad Honey Symposium] ​conjures an absurd, lush, occasionally poisonous world and the ravenous humans and animals that travel through it. . . . With echoes of Glück and Plath, Mao generates stunning landscapes where the flora and fauna reflect her presence and strength of voice.​”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“In Mad Honey Symposium, Sally Wen Mao offers delicious diction: ‘archipelago . . . arpeggios;’ ‘horntails / swarm the wax leaves;’ ‘Fetal and feral, we curl;’ ‘mouth on your pendulum;’ ‘in the rigmarole of lucky living—!’ She also offers a heightened attention to how words work and work out in various contexts. The poet takes us all over the place in time and geography—from her mother’s bed to Audubon’s dreams to sputnik to hive and back again—all in the service of feeling deeply. A lovely debut collection.”
—Kimiko Hahn..

'I glanced curiously at the stranger. He looked old and frail. The sky outside the window seemed darker with his figure in profile. Though he was sitting next to us, he appeared to be somewhere else entirely.'